The Future of American-Israeli Relations

Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask of Anything. Joining me today is Sorab Amari, a conservative colnist, editor, author of nonfiction books He's currently the U S. editor at UnHard. He's a Moinian public S scholar at the City University of New York Sorb has a unique perspective on quite a few things happening right now in the world. He is Iranian born, left Iran with his family about at age fourteen. was Raised as an atheist, but converted to Catholicism in twenty sixteen He is a confidant or att least personal friend to vice President JD. Vance, and also he's interviewed him three times as vice president and many times as a senator I have known Sorab personally for many years, although we have only been in touch on occasion We've had some public disagreements on Twitter, now X. I know that shocks anyone who follows me that I would do that. Nevertheless, I I'm very grateful that he came on, that he took the time to come. and speak to us to our community about issues that worry us and that he himself has written about a great deal, the strained U. S. Israel relationship, the rise of Anti Semitism on the American right, the Iran war, the larger questions of the Iranian regime, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, you name it, we'll get into it. Be we get into it, I just want to tell you that we have a sponsor for this episode for whom We are grateful, Julie and Frank Cohen sponsored this episode and dedicated it in memory of those murdered on october seventh, twenty twenty three Thank you to Frank and Julie I also love to invite you to join our Patreon community, subscribe to our sububstack If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, That's done at the Patreon or the sububstack. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions. live. So if you find any of that interesting or useful. They're great, very active communities. That's at patreon d. com slash Ashiv anythingthing or Khavivgura.ubstack. com Those links are in the show notes Sub, how are you? I'm good. thans for having me and it's good to see you. We actually met in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, for the first time at a Shabat dinner Yes. U where we were having I was there for a year in New York, I should say. My wife was doing an LLM in legal theory NYU and I found myself bumping around New York. And I met a lot of very smart people and thoughtful people, and you were certainly one of them and we had some interesting discussions. I want to just dive into it if that's okay. You have interviewed Jie Vance a couple of times very recently, including last week U And I want to get into that, but before we get into Iran, I want to ask something about the American political right that troubles me Tremendous. I'm going toay it out and ask you to tell me if I'm wrong, if I'm right if you share the concern. and I want to say outright you are familiar with this world. You have written explicit essays against anti Semitism and talked about these people as barbarians, some of them to some degree in some ways. I'm not accusing you. I'm asking you what's happening. There's a kind of chain of Joe Rogan, Dave Smith, Alex Jones, who calls Tucker Carlson a Divine prophet, Darryl Cooper, Ian Carroll, Candace Owens. These are people with millions upon millions upon millions of views. Tucker has complimented Candace, now Meghgan Kelly is getting in on it. They' these smaller tributaries like Fuentes and Jake Shields Rogan, Smith, Kelly, they give a kind of presentable persona to it all, a mantle of respectability And if Megan likes Candace, how bad could Candace really be? And if Candace isn't so bad, how bad could Ian Carroll be? And how could Darryl Cooper be a raging anti seemite? If Joe Rogan, who says about himself that he hates hate thinks that he's a deeply righteous character kind of ecosystem and I want to just I want to I'm going to go for the throat here directly and just cut to the chase JD Vance seems to me to be sitting above it all to be not understanding or pretending he doesn't understand. He gave a talk about how Republicans can't gatekeep these people. I think he was referring specifically to Tucker And yet, you know, everybody's saying that Petin He sits over a click that denies The Holocaust embraces outlandish anti Jewish conspiracies, won't say a bad word about Hitler. They protect each other. They have all these conspiracy theories. There's something unhealthy happening on the right And I have written this to you. I do not suspect Jie Vance of actually believing any of this, of being anti Semitic or conspiratorial What is this Where's it come from? Why is he so close to Tucker and defends Tucker and hosts a podcast with Tucker you know U right after Charlie Kirk's assassination Why does he launder this stuff? And where's the stuff even coming from? Oh yeah, that's a bundle of things. You know, look, you and I know each other uh and weak sort of inhabit somewhat overlapping circles a lot of my friendships, you know, over the over the like last two three years have become strained in that kind of pro Israel world. and I get I can get into why, but they're not all totally completely tattered. but because of that, there's lots of people in your audience who may not know where I'm coming at these issues. So I'd like to like put my own view on Israel on the table first, very briefly and where how I came to it And then I will definitely address what you're trying to say and what what you asked about. So I, obviously, as you say, I grew up in Iran and I When I came to the US, my first kind of form of political consciousness, like lots of people my age. um, was on on was developed on the left, like the hard left. And part of that was a sort of hostility to Israel. although I will say that kind of left variety of Hosts Israel always tried to resist the sort of u the figure of like the Jew as this kind of demonic being, which is part of like that's more like right wing Judeophobia and anti Semitism Nevertheless, I you know, it was part of my worldview because you were on the left And then and what I'm talking about here is like my late teenagers, to be clear And then I had a kind of political awakening in my early twenties when I went to do teeach for America. It's this program. I think Israel actually has an analog. It's a program that brings young recent graduates to underserved classrooms and You know, you're placed in this completely new community after college and you typically room together with fellow teach for America teachers and um, one of mine One of my roommates we got a house together was an Israeli American Um, and You know, we would have political discussions obviously in the house or something like that and I remember one time the Iraq and this is right after the Iraq war. I mean, this is two we're talking about two thousand five and the Iraq warar had was Still, like I said, at its peak and he and I had a ferocious discussion about it And I said something like, you know His name's Amir. I say Amir, you know, we none of this would have happened if if Israel hadn't, you know, lobbied for this war. And he like lost it He was like actually don't you know the like you know, while individual Israeli statesmen may have said this or that, the kind of mainstream Israeli position was against the Iraq warar and So that kind of like was one of those useful awakening moments in life And so I did that kind of it forced me because obviously I'm confronted with contrary facts to like do A deeper reading into why Israel exists. You know, I went on the website of Yad Vashem, somehow I scrolled my way to it and I read these stories of the righteous among the nations the, you know, Gentiles, non Jews who at great personal risk often harbor Jews try to save Jewish lives during the showu And I was like shedding hot tears at this. Um And I walked away with several conclusions about my politics. One is a kind of horror, my own personal horror at Politics of large abstractions whatever they may be, like large ideological abstractions that makeake it possible for you to say, well, that was the price of history that this or that happen. You know, no if you' know, trying to put yourself in the shoes of one of these righteous among the nations, you have to thing Here I am, one person, there iss this other person in need and facing political evil, what do I do? What concrete choice do I make That was one The second one was a basic secular Zionism was was sort of fused into my political DNA and it's still there you know, obviously at the time I was an atheist, now there's a conversion to Catholicism. I'll get into that, but Um As As an atheist, we'd say like, look in the nineteenth century and beginning in the eighteenth century in the nineteenth century the world divided itself into nation states and The process for the Jews, What meant that they tried to assimilate into their various nation states They tried that becausecause of anti Semitism, which was taking on a particularly kind of racial and almost biological caste beginning of the nineteenth century U it didn't work The Jews tried actually existing socialism, it didn't work So You know, there is a kind of necessity of Israel even before before the Holocaust. There the moral necessity of there being a Jewish state That is if we're going to divide up the world into nation states thenen the Jews have eminently sort of won the right to have one that they can call their own. So that's been part of my that's actually a very core part of my political DNA And so I did convert to Catholicism, but because Catholicism is different from other strands of Christianity, it doesn't have like a theology of Israel that there's no eschatological meaning with which Catholics or the church imbue the story of the modern nation state of Israel. But they treat it as the is a nation state. It's a legitimate nation state and it deserves to exist and has the right to defend itself And that's still part of like my baseline political view. only say this because I'm acutely aware as I hope that introduction suggested of the ways in which Anti Semitism can serve My favorite way to understand it is comes from psychoanalysis and the French theorist, Jacques Leacon who gave us this concept of the suture Right and of a suturing point. That is Human beings individually and society is at large are full of these constituutive antagonisms. So you as a person are full of different forces tugging at you and society is riven by these different forces that tug at you. Capitalism produces great wealth but it also generates massive inequality, etca, etc. Anti Semitism is a classic way as a classic suturing point that is rather than allowing people to confront the constituive antagonisms and contradictions that part of their society and taking political responsibility for them, it allows you to say that figure The Jew is who is responsible for all this. It kind of becomes this story you tell that neatly papers over your own society's internal antagonisms. U And that's kind of the that's my favorite theory of why antiemitism exists, at least in modernity Um And I think that we are going through a period in the West when the antagonisms are getting sharper, when people feel more vulnerable and fragile than ever before And so that kind of that story that people tell about to try to explain their own society's internal contradictions by projecting them onto this figure the of the Jew is coming to the fore again There's also the internet as a factor, etcetera, etcetera That's I think explains the phenomena you're talking about, you know, like the podcast bros and all that. Crently other thing that's happening And this is our task, which is made very difficult because of that what I just explained is there's also Grave concern among masses of people in the Democratic West on the left and on the right about all sorts of things that are legitimate things that we should be able to criticize about Israel about its behavior in recent years, about how its conduct of the war in Gaza about its you know frankly, advocacy for this war in Iran U And those are like actual things of actions of a nation state which while legitimate Precisely because it's legitimate, it should be subject to legitimate democratic contestation in the West. and people want to be able to do that and The problem is that those two things are happening in a parallel together the return of anti Semitism as a sort of suturing point as a way for people to explain the antagonisms in their own society. at the same time, with Israel, in my view and the view of lots of people, know obviously an overwhelming majority of Democats to the United States now, almost overwhelming majority of independents and a growing share of Republicans agge under fifty feel that they have serious disagreements with Israel with its with his maximalism maybe in the Middle East with how it treats Uh the Palestinians, especially in the, you know, for me, it's the West Bank, honestly, weirdly enough and we can get into that. The thing that sort of bothers me the most. Um and the sort of style of pro Israel rhetoric, which And I'll stop here, I promise I found over the past two, three years. A lot of Israelis and the pro Israel community in the United States needeedlessly turned friendly critics into enemies That is this mode where I've certainly felt it where I'm like, hey, I'm uncomfortable with what Ben Gveere says or with what was happening in the West Bank in terms of settlement expansion, expulsion of certain communities, these sort of quasi poggrrams and pograms often under the eye of the IDF either acting as adjuncts to the to the thugs or at the very least just sort of not doing anything to stop it Those are legitimate things. and I think the analytic task here to see where those two to sort of like to use the Vangorian formula, right? We should fight the new sort of mentally deranging brain rot of the new anti Semitism. as though there is no Israeli maximalism and Israeli cruelty and we should call out and critique and be able to debate that latter, Israel's behavior as though there is no Um you know, this kind of resurgence of We should be able to confront both is what I'm trying to say So that's I think I've tried to hit my own background and where I'm coming at this and try to address at a sort of a high level what I see is going on with the phenomena that you pointed to It's weird that they're happening at the same time Why wouldn't If you want to address a specific policy, look, I When an American says, you know, the reason we are hyper focused on Gaza and totally ignored Yemen, which America supplied the weapons and intelligence and deeply integrated into the Saudi war effort in Yemen, and Yemen had a death toll that's five times bigger than Gaza. and and crueler than Gaza. In other words, actual mass starvation of children, you know to a number that I think the last international sort of consensus number was eighty five thousand dead kids. and that didn't register on the minds of the Westn And so in American, I'll say, whyy are you guys so hyperfcused about Gaza? There's so many great conflicts. And by the way the answer is not to not focus on Gaza, the answer is to seriously look, to spend Western political capital, attention, bandwidth on many, many of these places where there could be a tremendous effect to that attention If it's only one conflict, then is it really about conflict? And I will say this to an American and the American will say to me But we fund this one. So first of all, that's not one hundred percent true. You fund a small piece of it, but also You know, that relationship of funding is two way. The Pentagon loves it because its uses Israel ass an R and D shop basically. It has all these it's also massive American leverage over Israel, which disappears that the funding disappears. And also It doesn't explain the phenomenon because the phenomenon is identical in a hundred countries in the world that have no connection to Israel, no military support, no funding of any kind. It had the same exact phenomenon happened in Copenhagen. So when I look at the cultural phenomenon and I look at how it rides right alongside The Nick Fuentes becoming laundered by Tucker Carlson, who's a friend of the vice president. The whole you know, there's so much to even the word MAGA covers vastly different and diverse groups. but that this could have that access, that this can suddenly explode at the same moment as this discussion about Gaza, people who come to me and say terrible war in Gaza with terrible humanitarian costs I don't debate them because I don't disagree with them because if the world is paying attention to terrible war, thank God. I'll say more than that. if The obsession with Gaza is because for the first time we're all holding these little glass boxes, these little glass squares in our hands and we can for the first time see directly and quickly the victims of war, the horrors of war And therefore, from now on, the Western consciousness will explode every time there's a war and all war will be more difficult because the whole world can see everything that then this Israel is the villain in this particular round, but it means that they'll be harder to have wars. We'll have fewer wars because everyone will see the worars. That's an amazing outcome. That's not a silver lining. That is a good turn for history Unless it never happens again unlesss the only war that anyone will see the victims of is Gaza because the only war that matters is the war in which Israel is taking part. And then it's something else. It's something else. manipulating the decency of millions of people, but it nevertheless isn't driven by it. And if you don't have the good luck to be bombed by a Jew, you will actually simply die and disappear and nobody will ever notice. What if the anti Semitic thing that's rising up? isn't as divorced from the genuine legitimate policy questions, which I, by the way I'm not opposed to cutting the aid. I'm for cutting the aid. Thereir cost to Israel for that aid. I don't know if people are familiar with the issue. That's a different episode. but Those are phenomenally important policy conversations But what if the obsessiveness of it, the arrival of it at this moment? What if that Venn diagram has a lot of overlap What do we do then? How do you understand it in Well, I I would I would somewhat challenge the premise there. I mean, I think lots of the that It certainly on the right, the people who are tend to be critics of the U.S. Israel relationship or want to recalibrate it. tend to be the types who are Also skeptical of the U. S. Saudi relationship with the U.S. Egyptian relationship There is this sentage is say, you know, like this American tradition of like, why do we fund any countries? Now I don't you may agree with that, don't disagree with that. I actually have my own views, which aren't those I think that it's worth noting that lots of the kind of Thomas Masy Tkes are also opposed to funding Egypt. In fact, they will stake out claims about as well, and they point to that to show that they're not just focusing on U.S funding for Israel other thing no, just but just a conft but but they they're They will only occasionally mention in order to not look like they're focused. The only debate is about America spends sixty billion, I think on deployments in Europe. That does not come up by these people in a conversation. Europe doesn't have a deployable military. I mean I think Poland's army today is larger than Germany and Britain's put together And American troops protected Europe for decades and decades. They don't think about deal with and that's twenty five times or I hope it did the math right what they're spending on Israel, fifteen times, whatever it is, it's a lot more than you really don't think it's about Israel I think there is also there is another factor which was the second I was just going to try to say this some some of the people who bring this up are I try to be pretty principled about it. And I don't think again, I reject the premise that they're only doing it so that they don't look like they're picking on Israel, But to a larger point about why there's this extra investment in Israel's behavior. I would raise two additional points. One is Unlike those other partnerships, unlike the partnership with Saudi Arabia or Egypt, none of those countries hold themselves out as Democratic beacons And their moral story isn't blended into the American moral imaginary the way Israel's is, right? So if you've been to proro Israel gatherings APAC or or AJC, I certainly had, you see sort of the the two flags, the Israeli and US. flags blended together. and a story told you know, as this kind of continuous a sort of moral merger between the two countries over democratic values, which is you know, and partly rightly so because Israel is a democracy in Israel proper. I think it's a huge problem And a lot of people are now raising this, which is that it wields the power of life and death over like five to seven million Palestinians in the territories who don't access anything like Israeli democracy, yet they're subjected to Israeli power and in a kind of absolute way Um But regardless No one no one looks to Saudi Arabia or Egypt as moral beacons. in fact, they're pretty openly autocratic states. There's they have no qualms about how they treat their own people or how they Israel is supposed to be different. And so As a result of that you know to my mind when you have the number of people who are becoming critical of Israel that weren't that way before ninety percent of Democrats but have an unfavorable view by some polls easily two thirds of independence and a bare majority of Republicans under fifty have an unfavorable view. You talk about millions of people here and I don't think It is either true or wise for Israel and its defenders to ascribe all of that T anti Semitic animists and what happens in the febrile kind of online space notot saying that that doesn't that's not a factor. Okaykay? I' because I began my whole discourse by saying you have parallel things happening. You have growing frankly, revulsion with Israeli behavior in the territories in, you know in its kind of maximalism in Lebanon and elsewhere the same time as you have this resurgence of of of anti Semitism as a way to sort of neatly wrap up society's problems and not look at your own political responsibility. on a mass scale life that All these people I don't think, because I know Americans, as you know Israelis, I know my fellow Americans. like the person sitting next to you on the subway And in fact, polls show us this doesn't have deeply anti Semitic views R? The worst you can get is that about a fifth of Americans hold what Uh, um, u advocacy groups describe as like typical anti Semitic tropes That's they also hold similar troops about probably about black people, about Arabs, about Mexicans, about whatever That's not the same as like hateful treatment of one people. And I think it's a very's a big mistake T basically look at Gaza and look at Yemen and see that there is more outrage about Gaza and therefore conclude it's all because of anti Semitism. becausecause I think That way lies even more isolation and pariahood for Israel than it's suffering now It's in it's such an interesting, u, such an interesting thing to listen to My My Israeli intuition hearing you talk, those polls are the same polls I've seen. and I think the future is very different, although we don't quite know what people mean when they say they have unfavorable views. If it's this government, if it's this war, if a future Israel that I don't know what somehow manages to ek out some kind of a resolution with the Palestinians Doesn't suddenly have the love come rushing back? I suspect not, but we don't fully know I think it would help Javeib. So this is the thing like look I told you my my ends? Yeah. I say look look I told you why I'm very at a baseline level, I'm a secular Zionist. Right? And I've been to Israel about half a dozen times in different groups. and settings, but they basically have all been like pro Israel junkets, just organized by different outfits Here's what I'll say. and I'm not saying this is mass opinion because most Americans don't get to travel abroad as much as I do. but I love Israel when I'm in T Tel Aviv. I love Israel when I'm in Jerusalem. I love Israel when I visit the Galilee U region and the lake and all that because it just feels like this is the homeland of the Jewish people. This is like legitimate green Israel and You know, yes, there are extra security measures, but who can reproach the Israelis for doing that after the various intifadas and etcetera. Totally fine I always felt this would I only now because things have shifted I feel like I can say it. when I when they take you like these pros are junkers, they take you to like This or that. setettlement, Gush this, whatever Um you know in various levels of like how kind of internationally odious they're considered, some of more than others U Some are probably places where under any future settlement they'll be part of Israel proper or whatever There is this weird quality to that life where it feels like settler life You know, you it's like they're try to like normalize it. It's like, oh, look, he's a settler dad. Yes, he like has a, you know, has an oozie. but like his kids have a trampoline. and if you're traveling with a family, your kids get to jump on the trampoline with his kid look how normal it is. But there is this hilltop militarized quality and this sort of sense that there are these other people who are What is their status? Will they ever be able to have a say over what military occupation rules over them. Again, I think it wields the power of life and death over these people. and it feels off Javiv. I don't know. And that's the question I wanted to point to you is As an Israeli who is in the kind of moderate band of the Israeli public opinion you have the same sense when you go visit these places? Like sometimes they'll even be like, look, the mayor of the settlement and the local like Arab whatever of Halidian chief they're working together on a project of, you know try to try to like environmental issues address them together. Theyve found a way to like work together. Obviously, in the backdrop of that is a state that wields the absolute power of life and death over a population that has kind of no say So that's my question for you as the only one I want to ask during this ha is you as an Israeli, when you visit such places as I'm sure you do from time to time Do you kind of feel that same thing that I'm talking about or is it or not, you think that's totally normal too. I'll tell you, u Just a little background before I give that answer.ase I spoke a lot. The hell is a moral beacon What the hell is a Israel's position in the American moral imaginary I said that these are prejudice creates focus And you answered in a way that makes complete sense in America, truly complete and total sense And I cannot quite wrap my head around it I am a member of a country that is essentially composed of refugees with nowhere else to go. sururrounded by nations and ideologies in which Jews cannot live, even if Jews had lived there for a millennium before Arabs lived in places like Iraq And they demand the right to continue to demand our destruction And they have overwhelmed Palestinian political world, the Palestinian political psyche Hamas wins an election today in the West Bank And they arm incessantly You know, what you described as maximalist? I I get I get I know what you're talking about You know, you can't have Hezboah on the border, so you raise the villages along the border. I get it. I hear that. But Hezbollah will never not shoot from those villages. ever, not ever. The day they're not shooting is a day where they're putting in place rockets to shoot down the road And this Iranian regime will never. It's a regime that has no border with Israel no interests in Israel. Israel is it doesn't lie on some kind of point that this regime needs to control in order to have safe passage for its oil Nothing. Israel has nothing. and this regime has spent forty seven years Obsessing to the point of it' it's the national holiday Koods Day where they have their great military. Why is that Kudsday? Why is that Israel the one thing that this regime has to destroy in the world in order to realize its revolutionary truth And so we're surrounded by a world I don't know The Israeli position in the morality play running around in the American psyche. I mean, I know it in the sense that I've heard about it a lot and read about it a lot But I never had it in my own head. So to me, Israelis are a bunch of people trying to figure things out And all of this stuff describes a prejudice. We were We were the moral core and now we are the now if we heartal core is the partart of the moral core. There was a little place where Thomas Jefferson, I understand, but We're part of the moral core and now if we do bad, we have betrayed, violated That G moral story of foreigners who don't know our history and don't know anything about us, but have set us up as their moral Oor I can't tell you how exhausting it is to be a Jew I am neither the great villain of this earth, nor the moral core of anything. I will continue to screw up I happen it to have a very comfortable answer on the question of the West Bank because I happen it to think there's no path out of this that isn't two states. And I happen to say that in Hebrew in right wing Israeli spaces routinely and they still invite me back. Military rule is unsustainable. Military rule is illegitimate. Military rule has no good and no meaning And I and and If I leave and they turn into another be failed state like what Syria was under Assad That's still better than me ruling them. and if that state, by the way, comes at me in a war, that's still better than me ruling them And I say all of that and then also have to inform you that in fact, most Israelis donon't share the settler concept, a religious Zionist vision that this is a redemptive story of the Jewish return. You know, these people they read the Bible and You don't have to believe in the Bible. that's not to you and me, that's to people listening in. But you know the prophecies talk about the prophets of the Bible talk about the worst times in all ofew history and the best times in all history, all at once when the Jews also all return to the land. So It's not so insane for some kind of a believing Jewe to think that this is a beginning of some kind of Messianic age. And these people believe in it and part of the coming of the Messianic age is the possession of this territory. Now these people are I don't think that the people who actually believe that sentence are twenty percent of the settlement movement And from their fringe edges that they're embarrassed by come the thugs you talked about that produce this violence, which I mean, I've written about it even in English about it the free press, right? that kind of stuff. So This is bad and wrong and Smelterch and Bengvir who basically control these policies in the West Bank right now because Netanyahu is a coward and do terrible damage for Israel and terrible harm to Palestinians. And it's much smaller than it looks on TV. It's much smaller than you think it is because of just the information space that you have access to. And it's still far too big for Israel to be exonerated because it's a kind of terrorism and terrorism could be very small and have a tremendous psychological impact on Palestinians And for the people that are directly affected and attacked, it's obviously not small. it's significant. So I don't have any need to defend Israel on these things. I think these are bad things that we need to stop and that Israel will pay a cost for and that it should pay a cost for. But I have to tell you somethingomething is stopping me from pulling out of the West Bank that is completely legitimate and that you don't have an answer for it. Maybe. I'll ask this as the question Kamas will definitely take over and definitely build what it built in Gaza and definitely come after our children. Definitely And if that's true Could you possibly tell Israelis Forget for a second morality. morality is really fundamental and critical to a healthy society. We need morality But just for ten seconds is a thought exercise, let's leave the moral question of military rule on the side after I've confessed to being basically where you are on the question Hamas takes over the West Bank. After an Israeli withdraw from sixty percent, seventy percent, I don't know how much it would withdraw from. It wouldn't include the huge Jewish populations in Jerusalem beyond the green light. Whatever it is, eighty percent You know what? ninety nine percent it pulls out of And Hamas takes over How does that not end with the destruction of the West Bank after Hamas carries out endless massacres and imposes terrible evil rule in order to build a tunnel system that'll be exactly what Hezbllah built on the border in exactly what Hamas built in Gaza, we're facing an enemy that demands our destruction. It demands it as a theological point. It is willing to destroy its own society on this demand You can come at the Israelis and hate them for what happened in Gaza. In fact, you can believe Israelis are innate monsters for what happened in Gaza.ot you never say made anything clim like that. Not you N it at the people out there who could. Anybody, huge numbers of Democrats do. fine You still have a problem in Gaza, Hamas having built the world's biggest tunnel system in order to survive underground an Israeli invasion, which they sought with october seventh, and not a single Gazan child has been allowed into the biggest most comprehensive bonch shelter system in the history of war that they built in Gaza and Bent Gaza's entire economy to We face enemies that are undeterable. that want only endless war. And our response to that is something none of the world is willing to have a serious conversation about That includes what the hell Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas actually are Yeah, I desperately want two states How do I get there if this is the enemy Great question. And I sort of I knew you would pose this. Again, ty its typical for me have like a multi layered answer. You might dismiss one and then take one seriously and we can go from there. But The first one is I think the the growing power of the settler movement, include especially its kind of messianic religious dimension undercuts the claims Maybe unfairly But it's just that's how public opinion works, right? maybe unfairly or not, but the fact that you know They talk about we're going to destroy rings of villages in Lebanon And then they talk about we're going to build settlements, whether it comes to fruition or not on or yes They're evil They terrible and I hate. Well, no, no, but I'm saying that what should I actually do? I understand that, but like that makes that makes people it's a raises a legitimate question to say Well is it really the security problem or they want this lamp Is it just territorial For most people, it's a security problem. Dengir and Smothut represent ten percent of Israeli society. If you kind of fudge the numbers and ask the question in the most expansive possible way, twenty percent of Israeli society twentyenty percent of people under forty, I think it was the last Yugv poll in America, don't think the Holocaust happened. ten percent of Americans think that Trump should be assassinated, and that's a legitimate thing that should happen. There's radical people at that end and they'll say the worst imaginable thing There won't be settlements in Lebanon. It's not extended a rhetorical strategedy that I've become kind of frustrated with You know, my friend Batia, I hosted her for a debate on Gaza at Unheard. And here's she kind of she said to me. I can only paraphrase, but it's worth looking at that debate where she said There are terrible things happening in Gaza right now, including suffering of children and civilians on a massive industrial scale that's horrible And there are Israeli cabinet ministers, including members of the security cabinet who say really blood curdling things about what should be done to Gaza However, and she said, the fact that A is happening should not be sort of linked in any causal way with B That is the fact that you know, there's a sort of like, what we should we should have migration, millions of them should leave. like things that happen that are like the main lessons of Jewish history is like mass population transfers like that are evil We should not the Jews of the last should be the last people even contemplating. Yet ministers openly say that. But she wanted to say, but don't like causally link that. to what you see in Gaza, which is horrible, but it's different. It's so not related. You could have it I think the world But let me me finish this point. sorry. So I'm saying I hear something similar here, which is You know, yes, these people say this and it seems to be Israeli policy. becausecause you know, obviously there are these attacks on villages and members of the IDF. either don't confront them or sometimes on video they are seen to be participating in them But that's not related to what you hear from these villages. from these these kind of ministers. That's just like and therefore Only the security reason is why we are not relinquishing anything in the West Bank. It's only not the land grabby reason It's def it defies Sorry, my My intelligence. I can't. Those are not sev things Those are not separate things holding ont to land as a security reason. Land is the security. land is safety. Your country with the size oforal not Timington nine miles wide. is security You're right. But if you know so there is a way you could do that without having any settlements. We control the external borders, et ccetera. You know, there are arrangements. And here that was my second point is the first time I ever visited Israel It was with the American Jewish Committee and they had us they gave have someone in the security apparatus I can't remember was Shinbait or you Masa. I can't remember someone who like briefs public facing elements of the security apparatus And this person, I mean, that's a different Israel. This is like twenty twelve. My goodness He was like, look, There is another solution, which is you know, we control the external borders of the West Bank And then we draw up the drawbidges, we sort of pull up the draw bridges into Israel proper. and we don't have anything to do with them. We're just like, boom, you do whatever You know, obviously, we reserve the right to respond That? or That was the theory of the Gaza disengagement. We pull out Kamas takes over after we pull out, then we have a blockade to prevent them from being able to bring in major arms and weapons And if they come at us, we shoot anyone who comes at the border because that's what borders are. And that's it. And in fact, Ulert after Sarron has his stroke at the end of two thousand five, Ulmert is his number two guy at Kadima. He runs formerly Kudnk, right winger. He runs in the election in two thousand six, talking about a similar withdrawal in the West Bank. He had something called a convergence plan He wanted to pull out a ninety percent of the West Bank. He said it before the election And he won the election and he formed the election, the government with the left and put the labor in The defense ministry, what that person was describing to you was the Ariel Sharon concept of there is no partner on the other side. The Arafats turn out to basically be Muslim brothers of various kinds who can never sign on the dotted line and finish the actual negotiation with actual peace. And so what we need to do is just get the hell out of there because we can't rule over them forever and ever And that ended on october seventh because really ended long before october seventh, but october seventh killed it forever. I can't pull out of these places if they will be turned into. There has never in the history of war been a tunnel system built like this. All of Gaza is a vast fortress under all the civilian populty. Nobody's ever built anything a fifth of this size. What do I actually do with this? If the war in Gaza is too brutal and there's no question in my mind that in some places the Israelis just did things that are not okay. by the way, it's a war, name a war where America didn't You can say that, you can argue it and you should people should argue that about a war But Hamas is still in charge. I saw that debate with Batia. One of the things you said was this was tenen months ago at the height of the hunger crisis Um, which, you know is a shocking incompetence on the part of the Israeli government and but it's the Israeli government. I have a whole podcast episode on this. People are going to hear this and say, surely not. It's an entire discourse This is we are led by the most incompetent people who have ever led Israel and they talk only to the most radical bits of their base. There is no other way that they understand to talk. Netzanyo literally hasn't engaged in the strategic communication war that Hamas and the other side has been engaged in consistently and intensively for three years And so the Israeli government has failed miserably at explaining itself. and then you can obviously argue. and in some cases I have, also in its actual actions and policies. But I don't know and I represent the vast majority of the Israeli left in this, not center, not right I don't know how to get away from what the enemy actually wants and is not the ordinary Palestinian, but this but everyone who will lead them. and what Iran invest in and Hezbollah invest in, how is the Israeli North ever going to be safe if Hezbollah is building those arsenals in the southern villages I don't nobody will answer that question for me And how do I measure the morality of it without that you and I haveavy will not be able to solve Israel's kind of secity moral dilemmas What we can do, I think, productively is to You've laid out the sort of Israeli moral flash security dilemma what would be helpful is for Israelis to acknowledge the U S. moral slash security dilemma as well, right? that You know, you have these sets of problems including some of them that are sort of endogenous to Israel's shifting political culture. I grant you that it is maybe twenty percent or whatever, ten percent Although I would say that justust as like G Z everywhere is trending, right? I think that's true of Israel. And so it may be that the old establishment could who could even speak the kind of moral language of the West is going to be uncedated and Ben Gvir represents more of the future than the past be that as it may The US also as a as a power whose leg legitimacy, even in its's Trump and guys, even when we say we're not moral, still has immense moral stakes in the world that it has to be seen as U a good guy. on the world stage You can see whyife not just for ordinary Americans, but for foreign policy elites. And this is happening at a bipartisan level R? people who are in the you know Pentagon in the, you know, intelligence communities are my sources of people I talk to as a journalist. They're not all tucker heads or whatever. They're like D The security apparachicss of the United States are worried about the U. S. image Visa V, much of the rest of the world, Visa V Israel and what it does in the territories And so It's almost like You want the Israelis to grant us something. President Trump reportedly often says, it's just become too much. He says BB is too much. He keeps saying too much, too much What front is the Isra are the Israelis going to give the world and their major patron in the United States Give us a little something that you're not kind of completely deaf to our Yeah our concerns, you know? Like I share with you this sense of u Even at the level of rhetoric, sorry, even at the level of, someone who comes around was a little softer who wasn't constantly like doesn't treat every critic as an enemy in the public square, in the digital public square and doesn't talk this way about the Palestinians, you know? like it would go so Damage on the moments and one of the most dangerous moments, you know, in years We are led by the most incompetent people who have ever led us It is it is an aston take the hunger crisis last year I think I know what the Israeli government thought it was doing when it stopped the aid. It saw those protests against Hamas And it thought that by creating a sense of urgency among ordinary Palestinians, it would massively boost those protests. and the best way to get Hamas out of there is to have Palestinians do it And so they declare, they announce the stopping of aid And they had data, very good data, data that the UN gave us journalists. I mean, data that was publicly available The UN had actually this dashboard where it counted how much food is in Gaza And Gaza was supposed to have six months worth of food already inside Gaza And so you can play this game of pretending to be not pretending stopping the supplies, but pretending to be planning to starve them for four months and still have a huge leeway That was the thinking in the Israeli cabinet and the general in charge of civilian affairs with Palestinians is the head of Kogad actually apparently said in the cabinet, we don't actually know as when does Israel ever trusted UN numbers? Now it's going to trust UN numbers O on this question. We're not we don't actually know that this is how this should go down And this this And then it turned out, I think, two and a half months into this policy or three months into this policy that actually, even though there was enough food in Gaza There was not enough efficient distribution in Gaza whichich should seem like a very obvious thing. People were hoarding because the Israelis just announced there wouldn't be enough food coming in, right? It was playing with the food supply of a displaced population in wartime as a policy idea that nobody thought was a cruel, be spectacularly stupid. You know what it wasn't? It wasn't intentional attempt to starve the population. You know what Israel wanted it to look like This government wanted it to look like an intentional attempt to starve the population. As soon as it became clear because of actual prices on the ground in the markets in Gaza. and people like me and I went to I took an An economist study of the prices in Gaza and went with it to the free press and the free press blew the whole thing up. and then the Israelis couldn't notice that actually prices were skyrocketing in Gaza. and so Hunger was actually setting in in some places. And then they began rushing in aid and never played this game again. Now That's what I know happened I will walk into a space with international people, people, foreigners, people who don't like why would they follow in Hebrew the day to day dealings of the Israeli cabinet And I say to them, No, no, we didn't try to starve people to death. We were stupid and callous and tried to look like we were trying to starve people to death This is a very weak defense Now, so This is the government that Yes, absolutely. Everything you're saying. it will say the worst possible thing. It will bring the most harm. I have actually concluded and I have talked about this on the podcast that Ben Vern Smeltich want Israel isolated in Pariah And the reason they want it is that in Israel that has no connections to the world, in Israel isolated and pushed to the wall is in Israel where their agenda is much more easy to push through as opposed to an Israel that is very international, very high tech and very open and very you know, has an open conversation within itself about these problems. and Still, I have a problem because I'm an Israeli What am I gonna to do with Hamas You said on that podcast at Bata that they're gone. Nobody thinks they can retake the place. And therefore, the war is really unjustified now. You're just killing people for no reason And yet here they are back know, I put out a podcast before the Iran warar. If you read Homini and you read Ali Shariati and the ideological and theological run up to the creation of this regime, you will learn what Mukawama means, what resistance means and what mass martyrdom and the ethos of martyrdom and the meaning of Imam Hussein's story for this regime What do I do with this enemy? First of all what? on the Iran question, the first response I had is an essay I wrote in unheard. And the headline was Iran's devastating hubris uh, Why Dvote your entire national project T. You know, to this to this ideology of the destruction of Israel I get that. I think good faith critics of Israel get. that there is an ideological dimension to the Iranian regime U they get that what I think the best again, the good faith critics and I think a lot of Americans, again, I really want to push back against the idea that millions and millions of people are now beholdven to braal anti Semitism without denying that's part of it. I think the problem for the Israelis is the fact that they have lotots and lots of great tactics But I don't see I don't see a strategy. or at least a realistic one And I think of all the Vice President Vance got a lot of heat from P Israel community for a series of interviews he gave not the one he gave to me, but u on the on the podcast circuit promoting his book where he said a nation of nine million cannot kill its way out of all of its problems And this is a point that really resonated with me because I've seen over a long period of time um, this tendency on on Israel's part to be like, Well, we have ninja robots and we have like these cool internet viruses that can go and blow shit up. and you know, And even on a public policy front, it's like, okay, well, we have a bad public policy problem. We're going to just like we're going to set up a new agency that's going to tell Israel's story. in some of these areas There is a need for as much a need for for Peacemaking where it's possible and granting mercy to enemies who are weaker who needn't even be enems. I'm not talking about Iran. I know the Iranian regime constitutionally believes certain things But the ordinary Palestinian, as you said, is not that And there has to be, I think part of partart of strategy. is to kind of to play regional politics as a game of addition. D't draw hard lines For everyone, I saw an Israeli minister, I think it's the mininister of Diasabora Affairs. And I understand he doesn't say foreign policy But he's likeul he doesn't even say that Ansbores. you know, Ryan Bober has a problem Their new problem is the axis of Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey. Well, Turkey is a really big power and it's in NATO And he said he used the phrase axis of evil. Now I think Turkish foreign policy and domestic policy is troubling on many respects. and and so on, but like So you can't have omnibilicosity, right in every direction Whereas over there elsewhere in the region elsewhere in the region are sitting the Saudis I think, notwithstanding the recent maybe some disagreements over the Iran war and its strategy, I think the Saudis would like to bandwagon with Israel M certainly more so than they would like to do so with Iran. And they have they're like we have one thing, which is some degree of recognition for the Palestinians. could mean all sorts of things. they have their own proposal. Others in the region are prefvererred. The moment where I was like, whoa, I can't be as vocally pro Israel as I was like a decade ago came when I was watching an interview with with the UK, with the Israeli ambassador to the UK who said Basically by the way, another LuMK who belongs to that same coture that today rules Is. Yeah, but said there will never be a Palestinian sayate when then you're like, well, okay, at some point that that's ruling over five, seven million people. There are elements of that rule, which I described that can make people very uncomfortable. Now There are other people in the world, by the way, who have second class kind of status, right? So like Shiites in Bahrain. lots of other kind of minorities of this kind China's various minorities. the element of like when are you going to end a full on military occupation and give these people a path to self determination? I think that's the thing that I think the vice president was getting at is like, A little mercy a little like ability to be soft here and there actually is part of a strategy, whereas what we get I think from Israel is just tactics, tactics, tactics You know, I'd love for to react to that I'll say two things and then ask you your reaction because it ends with a question. One is U in the Israeli experience, would you call it Omni Bilic Kosi or something like that Um And what do I mean by works We Israelis often the world often learns about the Israeli wars, the early wars, fifty six, sixty seven, seventy three, a couple wars in between that people forget about as distinct wars. But they were not distinct wars. They were battles in a single long twenty year war facing Ncerism, facing this Arab nationalist idea that we break down the boundaries between Arab states drawn by European empires and we defeat the Jews. and in doing that, we usher in a new age of the Arab in great dignity and you know taking their proper place in history. And that was Nasser's vision and even united with Syria briefly in the early sixties as a single state sererving that vision And war after war after war after war was necessary to finally defeat that fantasy, that dream. pperation that the Arab problem of modernity and weakness could be and division and all of that could be solved through the destruction of the Jews. And so what the Jews actually had to do was for twenty years war after war after war, fight this battle. So after the June war One of the things that I was trying to explain in places like you know, Western cable news was this wasn't a war. The June War was a battle You understand that there is now as the Israelis perceive it, and I think as the Iranians perceive it, a twenty year war against a new Nasser, a new vision, a new idea. The idea must be killed for Israel to be safe. There's no way to do this as pushing back Hezbollah a little bit or defeating one piece of Hamas or one airstrike against the nuclear program, or even one thousand airstrikes against a nuclear program It's about defeating and destroying the idea of Israel being the invincible undefeatable thing. And you have to find a new way to redeem Islam in this case as the Iranian regime perceives it, for restoring Islam, bringing it revolutionary, etcetera. So the Israelis have have been taught by the Middle East. But omnibilicosity is the only way out. We were not omnibelicos until october seventh. It's a little bit like the people who came to Goldemir and said, whyy w don't you sue for peace? In nineteen sixty nine? And she said whyy don't you end the occupation and then there'll be peace? And she said, There was no occupation until nineteen sixty seven and there was no There was no peace. The PLO was founded to destroy Israel in ' sixty four. And in fact, in its initial charter was not allowed get to strike the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank or the Egyptian occupation of Gaza. It was only about getting rid of the Jews So if you're an Israeli Jew and I hope this is clear, This is the historical experience that the Middle East imposed on the Jews. We're talking here about Mizraqi Jews are more likely Jews from the Arab world are more likely to vote Netanyahu and seek this Belicosity than Ashkenazi Jews, European Jews are more likely to vote left. But we're also here on this point talking about the left as well. People desperate for a Palestinian state, peopleople horrified at the occupation This is the enemy and we have to fight them until it's over until one of us lives or dies because the enemy won't let us do anything else. Every possible policy of magnanimity, of calm, of're pulling back of endnded in october seventh. Maybe that doesn' mayaybe it doesn't work. Maybe the enemy actually has to be defeated Yeah, And but the thing is the the enemy is not as monolithic as you say. Right? You had a bunch of the Gulf states already bandwagoning with Israel. They were never the Aemy and they're not the Turkey who's now identifies and Iemy, look but that daily, but truly that's why I understand that. but it's a whole. Turkey, the way, is an adversary, but it's not an enemy. You know Turkey Israel, the Israeli Greek alliianance is based on having a shared adversary in Turkey, but shared adversary is not the same as any. no supplies Israel with gas Yes, and it' Ive the Muslim re Solidarity that is expected of Erdiban. And despite his daily statements about Israel, he's like doing business and you can You can fly Turkish airlines, you can fly every day America has an adversary in China and not an enemy. and it's not fighting a war against it. And the American economy is dependent on China completely and waste. Well I'm grateful you brought up China because and I'm hitting my kind of limit on this, but I've enjoyed this conversation. But the thing is that that project that you laid out, which is a sort of ultimate defeat of the latest iteration of you know anti Israelism, I think it's not as unified as you suggest, but whatever we can handle over the details But that that is happening amid certain Tonic shhifts in American power and in perceptions of American power of relative American power with respect to China and what our you know, kind of priorities should be and there's Part of the Trumpan promise, although it actually began with Barack Obama was this idea that there are regions that are secondary to the U.S national interest and there are national security One of them is the Middle East given the rise of China and the fact that in a few years fififty percent of global GDP will be kind of located within the Pacific region and that in a world of scarce resources you know, we have to take what we can do. the U. S. you know, even just repelling Iranian attacks over the you know, continuous war that we had basically since june twelfth since the june twenty twenty five to the current phase of whatever the Iran war is is running outiv varus munitions such that it would endanger the U. S. ability to defend other allies or itself in the case of some other contingency point isn't Well, why doesn't Israel do everything that its critics on the American left and on the American right want it to do I think what would be helpful in clarifying if there's anything comes out of this podcast For some in the Israeli decision making apparatus to sort of just be like, look, this this This some things are changing This ally of ours feels taxed, overall everywhere It has other priorities that it has to attend to, domestic reconsolidation, industrial renewal you know, building up the interceptors or finding some other way to do them cheaper, all these problems And there's a sense in the American public that they can't do it if they're always engaged in this particular region. and therefore Although Omni Pelicosity may have worked for Israel in its kind of immediate post foundounding period, it may not be appropriate now, especially given its strength Right? At the end of the day, this is a nuclear state You know, I I really don't think, you know, that every threat she'd be elevated to likeike this flattening effect where Hucker Turkey, Iran, it's all one big field where everything is an enemy and we have to like try to sort of kill and ninja robot our way out of it. making peace here and there, being soft, I think would serve Israel I have not been able to my most thoughtful pro Israel interlocutors, I haven't been able to get this through And I think it may be an impasse in Israeli political culture. It may be a result of october seventh that fully grant that possibility But whatever it is Israel has gotten into a kind of Total Macabbeean mode appropriate maybe at a tactical level it's dangerous dangerous for Israel at a strategic level. I really believe this. as someone who began this conversation saying, I want there to be a Jewish state in the world that is safe and secure. Look the arguments you're making I can see where you're coming from I can even see the point on some of them I've had some serious critiques of this Israeli government, of Israeli policies over the past three years, including on these issues But then there's the one B thing If America pulls out of the Middle East and reorients to the Pacific As it keeps saying it wants to for twenty years now. I think I've been hearing somebody say it' somewhere in Washington It's not Israel keeping America in the Middle East. It I keep telling Israelis, we might be going this alone. By the way, those wars we went alone. sixty seven, we did not have American help in fifty six. America pushed us Given threatened sanctions at the UN. in ' forty eight, we were under an actual American arms embargo So the Nocerist moment at the founding of Israel when Israel was most Vulnerable was alone. And we may have to face our enemies alone again. And you're saying nuclear, but What are we going to nuke somebody? I mean, that's not Nuclear is a great thing on paper unless people call your bluff and you're bluffing with nukes I'm not sure that a regime willing to destroy its own people is bluffing with nukes. I am pretty sure the Israelis, certainly Israel's neighbors don't think it will use that nuke unless it's literally existential and defensive There are real limits on Israeli power. There's an unwillingness I think in the West to understand that Hezbollah is the self destruction of Lebanon is willing to literally see Lebanon destroyed on the altar of destroying Israel. because of this vast religious frame that everyone dismisses out of hand As though it's rational that Iran for forty seven years has has expended so much of its national capital, so much of its of its efforts and absorbs so much harm and so much isolation and such damage to its economy on the altar of a stronger country it has no border with and no interests and The basic idea of our enemies is that if they're willing to mass martyr themselves, If they're willing to see What has happened to Gazar, what has happened to Hezbollah to Lebanon to southern Lebanon, But you know, even an order of magnitude, larger That very willingness to martyr themselves. They talk about this explicitly. This is what martyrdom means as a strategic force multiplier in Iranian discourse for decades in the regime's discourse thenen if they're willing to martyr themselves at that scale or their people at that scale, we are left powerless because what are we going to do kill a bunch of people kill more people. Look at the damage to Israel from the harm that has come from these wars If they are willing to sacrifice their entire populations on the altar of destroying us for this grand religious vision This isn't Lebanon's view. Lebanon is desperate To get out from under this Hezbllah vision of things, this mass martyrdom ethos of this particular Shia Mukawama Absolutely. explicitly, they've said it out loud Hamas has announced Raazi Hhammad said it in the week after october seventh and has said it since. that there'll be more and infinite october sevenths until all the Israelis are annihilated irrespective of the harm to Palestinians, the Palestinian cause, the Palestinian politity I don't see in Washington an understanding of the nature of the enemy And what that means is that if you pull out Imagine it's not your problem You know, every American who says to me, we're in debt. We have to stop giving aid to countries ever argue with that. That is dignified, respectable. You're a taxpayer worried about your tax money. My only response to that is to thank you for everything that America has done for Israel in the past. There's nothing else I have a right to say But if you're pulling out of the Middle East, my one warning to America is that the Iranians won't stop You pressure Israel into pulling back and staying put and quieting down And the Iranians will continue to attack it. They will arm until they have an opportunity to attack. There will never not be a war, cononvincing the Israelis that the war is guaranteed, which Iranian rhetoric and Iranian armaments and Iranian preparation of Hamas and Hezbollah for war has done and october seventh, of course There will definitely be that war. Well, if there's definitely going to be that war, better on your schedule than on theirs betteret before theyve finished all their preparations for five or ten years Then after they finished all those preparations And now the Iranians know that if they blockade Hormuz, nobody can stop them. Nobody noobbody can blockade them back to the point where they lose their leverage. They have that leverage And they're going to keep trying to destroy the Israelis And the Jews of Israel are not American Jews that didn't spend the last hundred years discovering the promise of liberalism come true and becoming the moral core of someone's moral imaginary. The Israelis were the Jews who could not get into America when America shut its doors or anywhere else on Earth They're almost all of them the grandchildren of refugees They have nowhere else to go and they're certainly not willing to ever again live at the pleasure at the willingness of anybody else And so Iran will come for us. And we will fight them And it'll be more desperate because we won't have that backup of allies of America of the West. We'll be the great villain of the world And that's okay We don't need to have that backup You guys have other problems in the world to look after. And it'll look like the nineteen sixties where we fight alone. and it might end in a nineteen seventy three oil embargo for the West, or something vaguely similar in the Strait of Hrmz. And America won't have that leverage over us. It won't be supplying us not with weapons and not with diplomatic support And the Iranians will still come for us and we'll still have to fight until the vice president, who very well may be the next president, is in the One of the front runners, one of the I don't know, six people in the running slated for that job until there's a serious grappling in that camp of the Republican partarty with the nature of the enemy that Israel faces I don't know what to say about this. If you say to me, the Israelis are incompetent fools who just their only response to everything, you know, if all if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and their only response to everything is is more war omni belligerentnce And they're sometimes callous and cruel or even too often callous and cruel I might even agree with fifty percent of that D depends what you say. I might agree with ten percent of it. I might agree with seventy five percent of it And by the way, for Israel's own mistakes Israel will pay a price But the nature of the enemy won't change. They remain. They stand there. They will cause terrible harm to everybody around. They will ultimately cause terrible harm to the West. They' already demonstrated that they can do that. And until that's recognized I don't know what to do with this discourse in Washington. I can't stop these wars because Israel iss not instigating these wars What's happening in Lebanon? began After the Israeli North was emptied, and bombarded A year afterfter October seventh That's when Israel turned on Hezbllah Not before And this last round was begun by Hezbollah after the killing of Kammine Why did Lebanon have to get dragged into the Israeli Ran warar Hezbollah deemed it so And the attacks on the Iranian mainland, the beginning of a direct Israeli Iranian back and forth Iran started that Iran carried out the first missile volley because Israel attacked Hezbollah The only thing that Israel overstepped in attacking Hezbollah was attacking the head of the Kuds Force of the IRGC in the embassy in April of twenty twenty four at the embassy in Damascus But this was the Iranian general literally directly masterminded every single one of those Hezbllah rocket attacks. Wh literally ran it. This is an Iranian general who's on the Sura council of Hezbollah which is attacking Israel kinetically and emptying Israeli cities for six months. By the time Israel takes him out as a combatant commander And that Iran responded to with a volley of hundreds of missiles on the Israeli homeland And then there was an Israeli response Iran escalated. Iran drove those Hezbollah attacks. Iran gave that order. And then Iran was the first to use its mainland for an attack on Israel, not a proxy It wasn't because Israel wanted to drag Iran in. I, by the way, did think we needed to escalate to Iran because Iran was the driver here and just to make Lebanon suffer is ridiculous and immoral. Iran had to. The Iranian regime had to pay that price But Iran actually escalated us all into it. and it will happen again and again and again until the idea that drives these wars, these never ending wars, the idea that Israel is destroyable The idea that God demands Israel's destruction and that nothing can happen and everyone can burn to the ground Until Israel's destruction is achieved, until that idea dies. these wars won't end. The Israelis have to turn out to be invincible and the only way to show that is to have it actually happen And they will turn out to be invincible But it'll be painful in the long term Nobody has yet explained to me a scenario where all of that doesn't happen. I don't know how to stop it. I don't know how to change them. I don't know how to not just see this through to the bitter end because they won't stop And and uh I will Double down on every piece, every piece process available to me, sure And yes, sometimes the Israelis are absolutely in the wrong as multiple podcast episodes of mine have argued If I pull out of the West Bank today We need to stop those Jewish terrorists who have such a powerful effect also on how Palestinians understand what's happening to them. And I call them terrorists and I've done in an entire episodes But if I pull out of the West Bank today it goes to Hamas and it turns into Gaza but sixteen times larger Well, that's at least we laid out the dilemmas. I think we did a good job laying out the dilemmas. I don't think we can solve them, but Do you think I'll say this the last question Do you think American policy conversations are up to this? I'm not hearing A serious's grappling. with the scale of the problem in Washington, notot among our friends, not among our opponents. I I I I I think there is a Upsside, I think there is a brutal honesty which sometimes cuts against Israel, sometimes it favors it. you know, I think Maybe to some extent, Contrary to Mbe to everything I've said, there's a kind of demoralization. not like demoralizes and you lose your morale, but like the fact that we don't talk about Israel anymore at all in that kind of elevated moral sense that like when I was reading the New Republic and like Marty Pereretz and Neon Weaselter M and I admire and so on you know, we don' It becomes hard to talk about Israel in those terms. after the events of recent years Um, and that can Yeah,' it's a d to Israel's public image However, it can also be, I think the basis of honest more honest policy making that's not clouded by mystification. So here if I took away one thing from this conversation where I'm I'm like, okay, I really feel this from Haaviv is like I don't want to be anyone's like moral exemplar. I just want to I just want to live and I want to have my country. every Everyone will appreciate that. Everyone who's honest and not animated by bigotry will understand that with prejudice Um, you know, like there is again, there's costs associated with the loss of that moral aura but it may be in the long term a springboard for actually sharper policy making. I think the best I can do. So Rob, thank you so much for joining me I feel coming away from it like we really walk through all the problems, the Gordian knots hopefully was helpful to somebody in some way. I really appreciate it. Uh no no solutions, but Sometimes understanding the questions better is enough. Thank you so much too. Thank you. That was wonderful.